Levinas and Asian Thought

edited by Leah Kalmanson, Frank Garrett & Sarah Mattice

Publication Year: 2013

While influential works have been devoted to comparative studies of various Asian philosophies and continental philosophers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Derrida, this collection is the first to fully treat the increased interest in intercultural and interdisciplinary studies related to the work of Emmanuel Levinas in such a context. Levinas and Asian Thought seeks to discover common ground between Levinas’s ethical project and various religious and philosophical traditions of Asia such as Mahāyāna Buddhism, Theravādic Buddhism, Vedism, Confucianism, Daoism, and Islam.
In these 13 essays, contributors draw on resources as diverse as the self-sacrificial ethic of bushidō, Islamic jurisprudence, and contemporary research in cognitive science. The essays are organized around three primary themes of enduring ethical, political, and religious importance. The first set of essays considers a dialogue between Levinasian and Asian accounts of the self, others, and the intersubjective relationship. Through a conversation with a variety of non-Western traditions, the second group of essays addresses the question of Levinas’s extreme portrayal of the self’s responsibility to the other and its potential limits. Finally, the collection ends with essays that utilize Asian thought and culture to consider ways in which Levinas’s ethics of alterity might be put into practice in the sphere of politics, social norms, and institutions.
Levinas and Asian Thought is not only a comprehensive attempt to bring Levinas into conversation with the philosophies of Asia, but it also represents a focused effort to recognize, address, and overcome Levinas’s own Eurocentrism. Overall, the thoughtful investigations collected here chart new territory, pushing Levinas’s practice of philosophy outside its familiar European and Jewish contexts, expanding our understanding of key Levinasian terms, thus furthering the thinking necessary for ethics as first philosophy. This volume will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and students, as it builds connections among Levinas studies, Asian philosophy, comparative philosophy, continental philosophy, and ethics.

Title Page, Copyright Page

Contents

Abbreviations

Acknowledgments

Frank Garrett would like to acknowledge a debt of gratitude to Peter
K. J. Park for guidance throughout this project and to Stephen Harding
for immeasurable support.
Leah Kalmanson and Sarah Mattice would like to thank the philosophy
faculty at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa for their support.
We extend our gratitude especially to Ron Bontekoe for initially...

Introduction

An important question of any comparative project concerns motivation
and incentive. Why compare “philosophies” across cultures and,
in our case, why choose Emmanuel Levinas as the central figure of
the collection? Comparative philosophy, although typically associated
with cross-cultural work, shares the same set of philosophical tasks...

Part I: Selves and Others

1. Facing (“and Yet Not Facing”) East

In this essay, the condition of what I identify as the eccentric self will
inform our investigation. This self is fractured and fragmented, decentered
and contingent, and (employing Buddhist terminology) ultimately
empty.1 By examining the kōan literature of Zen Buddhism,
we can excavate a phenomenology of subjectivity that speaks toward...

2. Desire and the Possibility of Escape

It is difficult to know how to forge a path between the thought of
Emmanuel Levinas and the teaching of the Buddha. This is, by and
large, uncharted territory, and one cannot help but feel overwhelmed
by the possible threats of generalization and reductionism that loom
therein. To begin with, there is Levinas’s regrettable and often enough...

3. The Legalist Betrayal of the Confucian Other

The many cultural worlds — Russian, Jewish, German, French, Lithuanian
— that Emmanuel Levinas inhabited in such depth, and which
he traversed constantly and adroitly, were diverse. Levinas’s frame of
reference, however, does not extend much beyond the Western and
Judeo-Christian orbit. His critical tools are the result of his immersion...

4. The Space between Us

This essay brings Emmanuel Levinas and Watsuji Tetsurō into constructive
philosophical engagement. Rather than focusing primarily on
interpretation — admittedly an important dimension of comparative
philosophical inquiry — my intention is to put their respective views
to work, in tandem, and address the problem of the embodied social...

Part II: Responsibility and Its Limits

5. On Debts, Duties, and Dialogue

The simple etymological fact that the English word ought is derived
from an old English spelling of owed should alert us to the possibility
that ethical obligation has something to do with indebtedness
to others.1 Both Emmanuel Levinas and ancient Indian Vedic
moral metaphysics try, in very similar yet interestingly different ways...

6. The Complicity of the Ethical

Beyond the specific questionability of Greek philosophy for Emmanuel
Levinas, and despite Socrates’s testimony in the Apology that
human wisdom is worth little or nothing in contrast with a divine
wisdom that no mortals possess, there is a sense in which all wisdom is
betrayal. Wisdom, even the most compassionate and pacifistic, can be...

7. Acting toward the Other with/out Violence

An alternate version of this gruesome yet compelling tale of one of
Buddha’s former lives has the young prince lie down in front of the
famished mother tigress, offering up his body to her so that she can
live and feed her cubs. Seeing she is too weak to eat him, he proceeds...

8. The Hidden Hour

What is the relation of killing to dying, of taking life to offering it up?
These two events, as I wish to think through them here, meet one
another in the mortal equation of violence. On this point we might
recall Heraclitus: “One must realize that war (polemos) is shared and
conflict (eris) is justice (dikē), and that all things come to pass in...

Part III: Practices, Norms, and Institutions

9. Cambodia, 2009

Writing in the aftermath of the totalitarian politics in the twentieth
century and the slaughter of “millions on millions of all confessions
and all nations” (OB v), Emmanuel Levinas devoted himself to isolating
and identifying the locus of the ethical imperative and elaborating
the distinctive and autonomous discourse of ethics.1 Is this...

10. Dialectics of the Unseen

This essay is an effort to look at Islamic ethics in the light of Emmanuel
Levinas’s attack on totalizing philosophy, ontology, and theology.
In particular, I compare Levinas’s remarks on the invisibility of
the other, and the metaphysical desire this engenders, with the notion
in Islam of faith in the invisible or the unseen, al-ghaib. Through...

11. Absolute Otherness and the Taste of Powdered Green Tea

Despite being the very man to have written that “legs that can walk
will already be able to dance; hands that touch and hold will be able
to feel, paint, sculpt, and play a piano in the surprise of conforming
to an ideal never seen previously” (EN 183), it is well known...

12. Vitality as Responsivity

At first glance, it might seem inappropriate to place the classical Chinese
thought of Lao-Zhuang Daoism in dialogue with the postmodern
continental philosophy of Levinas, given the rather obvious fact
that they emerge out of utterly disparate traditions.1 And yet, a closer

13. The Flow of the Breath

Phenomenology challenges us with the opportunity to become aware
of that which we normally take for granted, allowing us to see things
that would have otherwise gone unseen, and to listen to voices that
would have otherwise gone unheard. However, there are phenomena...

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